Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

Summary

An unflinching chronicle of gentrification in the twenty-first century and a love letter to lost New York by the creator of the popular and incendiary blog Vanishing New York.

For generations, New York City has been a mecca for artists, writers, and other hopefuls longing to be part of its rich cultural exchange and unique social fabric. But today, modern gentrification is transforming the city from an exceptional, iconoclastic metropolis into a suburbanized luxury zone with a price tag only the one percent can afford.

A Jane Jacobs for the digital age, blogger and cultural commentator Jeremiah Moss has emerged as one of the most outspoken and celebrated critics of this dramatic shift. In Vanishing New York, he reports on the city’s development in the twenty-first century, a period of "hyper-gentrification" that has resulted in the shocking transformation of beloved neighborhoods and the loss of treasured unofficial landmarks. In prose that the Village Voice has called a "mixture of snark, sorrow, poeticism, and lyric wit," Moss leads us on a colorful guided tour of the most changed parts of town—from the Lower East Side and Chelsea to Harlem and Williamsburg—lovingly eulogizing iconic institutions as they’re replaced with soulless upscale boutiques, luxury condo towers, and suburban chains.

Propelled by Moss’ hard-hitting, cantankerous style, Vanishing New York is a staggering examination of contemporary "urban renewal" and its repercussions—not only for New Yorkers, but for all of America and the world.

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Vanishing New York - Jeremiah Moss

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INTRODUCTION

ONE OF THE GREAT TRAGEDIES OF MY LIFE WAS THAT I HAD the misfortune to arrive in New York City at the beginning of its end. It was 1993, I was twenty-two years old, and already I was too late. I had missed the city’s every heyday—the rambunctious punk years of the 1970s and ’80s, the beatnik days of the 1950s and ’60s, the glorious wartime forties, the radical lefty thirties, the bohemian 1920s and ’10s, all the way back to the ur-countercultural era of Walt Whitman carousing and espousing at Pfaff’s beer cellar in the 1850s. I missed it all, over a century of the best of New York, thanks to two uncontrollable facts of my birth: its year and geographic location. But we cannot choose our time or place, and I hurried to the city as soon as I could, unaware that the early 1990s was quite possibly the worst moment to get attached to New York. It was like falling crazily in love with a ninety-three-year-old, too blind to see that she was fading. I was Harold and New York my Maude. The city looked so alive—filled with creative vitality, still untamed and rough around the edges. How could I not believe it would last forever? I allowed myself to fall, as if we would have all the time in the world together.

That experience of having missed out, along with its attendant emotional cocktail of anger, grief, and bitter disappointment, surely helps drive everything I write on New York and its vanishing. On this topic, I am not dispassionate. I am biased and prone to nostalgia. You should know that up front. While the New York Times called me a curmudgeon with a penchant for apocalyptic bombast, and the Daily News dubbed me a fetishist for filth, I come to New York a romantic, Woody Allen’s Isaac Davis in the opening of Manhattan, idolizing and romanticizing the city all out of proportion. Like him, I’ve also struggled to find the right tone for my book, something profound, not too preachy or angry. But how can I write about the death of New York, the greatest city on earth, without shaking a fist? New York deserves preaching and anger, romance and nostalgia. It deserves a passionate, furious defense.

Dear reader, if you’re the sort who’s always telling the outraged romantics among us to get over it and move on, because everything changes, then you might not want to read further. You will be terribly bothered by most of what I have to say. If, on the other hand, you are troubled by New York’s twenty-first-century transformation, if you lament the loss of the city’s unique character and wonder what the hell happened, then read on. You will find the lost city in these pages, through a (sometimes painfully) detailed account of its disappearance. When all is said and done, you might end up with a broken heart. Either way, you’ve been warned.

To borrow the first line of Jane Jacobs’s classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is an attack on the luxury vision of New York that characterized the Bloomberg years. It is an attack on suburbanization, hyper-gentrification, and all that led up to it. A plea for the soul of the city, this book is not a nostalgia trip, but it is about history. Mostly, it’s about the city in the 2000s, life in the New Gilded Age, now that the rambunctious New York we knew has breathed out its death rattle.

Reports of New York’s death are not greatly exaggerated, though some would argue otherwise, insisting that the city’s undomesticated heart still beats in far-off corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx, that you’ll find a faint pulse in whitewashed Manhattan if you look hard enough. These insistent optimists, deep in denial, point to any trace of the old town and say, There is New York. Yes, there it is. But it’s only a remnant, a lone survivor from an endangered species rapidly vanishing. Maybe it’s that dive bar with the Ramones on the jukebox, or that bookshop with a cat lounging atop the stacks, or the rare sighting of a transgender outlaw walking some West Village street in platform heels. It’s like finding a polar bear, sweating on her melting chunk of ice, and then denying that the world is cooked because, hey, there’s a polar bear. Others quote from the long history of doomsayers, the many writers who declared the city dead. The complaint that the real soul of Manhattan has already expired is a long-standing one—perhaps as old as a nineteenth-century Knickerbocker’s pining for a mythological Dutch past, writes Bryan Waterman in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. That’s true. But has the complaint ever been made by so many, so relentlessly, and with such passionate certainty as it is today—and with so much evidence to back it up?

Novelist Caleb Carr called the massive change to the twenty-first-century city a regrettable, soul-sucking transformation. Patti Smith told us to find a new city because New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. David Byrne wrote an essay on the cultural death of New York, saying, most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich. Essayist David Rakoff observed how the town’s vibrancy and authenticity have been replaced by a culture-free, high-end-retail cluster-fuck of luxury condo buildings. Responding to all this, the counterargument goes: But it’s safer! The streets are clean! And we have great restaurants! In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik summed it up: New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. . . For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier.

I could go on with pages of similar quotes, all from the past decade or so, a chorus of voices from literature, art, new media, journalism, all making the same argument: at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the city changed in what felt like an instant, and the change wasn’t good. In short, New York has lost its soul. The place is dead. Okay, dead might be hyperbolic. Is dying a better word? How about comatose, awaiting a miraculous revival? Maybe this shift is just another phase in the city’s long and ever-changing evolution. But who ever thought New York would have a soulless period?

This book, like my blog of the same name, is both a historic record and a personal document. I can’t disentangle the two. As a historic record, it is filled with facts, many gleaned from newspapers, books, magazines, and blogs, as well as firsthand interviews and my own experiences. I’ve done my best to be accurate, but singular truth is a slippery thing when recounting the city’s daily dramas. As a personal document, this book is filled with metaphor and conjecture. It is an emotionally inflected account from someone who lived the story and was affected by the plot. Let’s not delude ourselves with fantasies of objectivity. How can anyone be objective about New York? It’s not a souvenir snow globe or a designer coffee table. It’s a living thing, an unwieldy ecosystem filled with many smaller ecosystems, all interdependent, making up the complex, multicellular organism of the city.

There are many New Yorks, as many as there are New Yorkers, each one of the eight million and change carrying a personal metropolis in the heart. Not to mention the many fantasized cities that throb in the hearts of aspiring New Yorkers yet to arrive. The city that I am lamenting is my New York, but it’s also a version of the city shared by millions. Since 2007, in my blogospheric life, I have been talking with and listening to countless New Yorkers and lovers of the city from all over the world. Continually, they pour out their grief and rage over the loss of New York’s soul. That tragic Greek chorus backs me up, humming along in these pages.

When I say the city, I’m talking about an idea that includes physical places, as well as people, but also a certain character and mood. I’m talking about the city I dreamed of back in my small-town New England life, when I plotted my own escape from a dull little world of snoozing Sunday afternoons domed in the drone of cicadas, lawnmowers, and—let me just quote the poet Frank O’Hara here: "I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."

My city is the city of artists, writers, and assorted outcasts. It’s the city of E. B. White’s passionate settlers, the boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart. When I say the city, I’m not talking about the whole city. I mean mostly Manhattan, but also large parts of Brooklyn. I mean only some of Queens and the Bronx, because my city is a romantic notion and, let’s face it, it’s not easy (for me, anyway) to conjure romance for Flushing or Throgs Neck. I don’t mean Staten Island, because precious few feel romantic about Staten Island (no offense), though the ferry is delightful, especially on a hot and humid summer day. The city that I’m talking about is the one that, throughout history, has been a beacon to dissatisfied and desperate people, whether they were escaping from Peoria or Flatbush or old San Juan.

My city is the city of dark moods, scrapyards, and jazz. Of poets, painters, and anarchists. Of dirty bookstores, dirty movies, and dirty streets. Of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue trumpeting over black-and-white Manhattan, and Travis Bickle’s taxi roving through the steamy rain, that grimy yellow splash. It’s the city of Edward Hopper’s melancholy rooms and Frank O’Hara’s I do this, I do that. It’s also a working-class city peopled by men and women who love with a tough love, in thick accents and no time for bullshit. It’s a tuna sandwich at Eisenberg’s, an egg cream at Ray’s Candy, and sometimes lunch at 21. It’s shoeshines, dive bars, and riding the subway all the way to Coney Island for a corn dog and the freak show. Your city may differ, but if it’s anything like mine, you’re grieving, too, because the stuff of it, the gut-level feeling of it, is vanishing fast. Too much has already gone.

We all have our own lost city. If we stick around long enough, we lose the city of our youth, our dreams and foiled ambitions. Joseph Mitchell, great chronicler of Gotham, wrote, I used to feel very much at home in New York City. I wasn’t born here, I wasn’t a native, but I might as well have been: I belonged here. Several years ago, however, I began to be oppressed by a feeling that New York City had gone past me and that I didn’t belong here anymore. I could say the same today, but this book isn’t about how we all lose our personal city. It’s about how the city has been taken from us. It’s not just the story of a death; it’s the story of a murder.

From its beginnings, but especially since the late 1800s, New York was the unbridled engine of the nation’s progressive culture and creativity, sustaining a diversity of people, feeding the world with art, ideas, and ways of life that pushed the boundaries of convention. But now it seems this period has come to an end. The spirit of the city as we knew it has vanished in the shadow of luxury condo towers, rampant greed, and suburbanization.

This is not unique to New York. Hyper-gentrification, the term I use for the force that drives the city’s undoing—gentrification on speed, shot up with free-market capitalism—is a global pandemic, a seemingly unstoppable virus attacking much of the world. San Francisco is dying, maybe even faster than New York. You see it in Portland and Seattle. Austin and Boston. Paris, London, Barcelona, and Berlin have all been infected. The virus has spread as far as Tel Aviv, Beirut, Seoul, and Shanghai. And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture. While I speak to the global issue in this book, New York is my case study. It may be chauvinistic to say New York is the world’s capital city, but New Yorkers are chauvinistic.

If you take away just one thing from this book, let it be this: Hyper-gentrification and its free-market engine is neither natural nor inevitable. It is man-made, intentional, and therefore stoppable. And yet. Just as deniers of global warming insist that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to our world’s climate, so deniers of hyper-gentrification say that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to New York, and that its extreme transformation in the 2000s is just natural urban change. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about the weather, I’m talking about the climate, and New York’s climate has been catastrophically changed.

How did such a catastrophe befall the greatest city on earth? It didn’t happen all at once. After decades of scheming on the part of urban elites—the real estate magnates, financiers, planners, and politicians—who worked tirelessly to take the city from those they considered undesirables, Mayor Ed Koch really got the ball rolling in the 1980s. Rudy Giuliani brought the muscle in the 1990s. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 played a pivotal role. And then, after the turn of the millennium, Mike Bloomberg dealt the death blow, a stunning coup de grâce. Gentrification morphed into hyper-gentrification. Mainstream young people flooded in from the suburbs where their white-flighty grandparents had fled years ago. They came in droves, many of them (not all) armed with a sense of Manifest Destiny, helping to turn New York into a sanitized vertical suburbia. They carry a share of blame, the new arrivals who say they love New York, yet celebrate the city’s makeover into an image of their Maple Valleys and Prairievilles, their Springfields and Massapequas, complete with hundreds upon hundreds of chains: Starbucks and 7-Elevens, Applebee’s and Olive Gardens, Home Depots, Targets, IHOPs, Dunkin’ Donuts and—God help us—Denny’s.

While it’s true that you can still find a pulse, here and there, along the thickly settled stretch of Manhattan, and that the city’s soul still haunts pockets of the outer boroughs, this book is not a Baedeker to those pockets. It is a journey through the ruins, a dyspeptic trip through the parts of town hardest hit during the Bloomberg years. Starting out on the Lower East Side, where the East Village has been my home for more than twenty years and where twentieth-century New York was born, we’ll move around the map, down through the Bowery and Little Italy, up through Greenwich Village, into Chelsea, Harlem, and then out to Brooklyn and beyond. Along the way, I’ll offer theories and analyses of the changed city, the altered psyche of New York, once neurotic, now evermore narcissistic and sociopathic. Like my blog, Vanishing New York is a polemic, an obituary, a book of lamentations and a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct. It is also, of course, a love letter to the town I can’t seem to leave. Because there are still polar bears. If you look for them. And I am always looking for them.

Right now, as I write, it is spring. My window is open, the rusty screen quivering where steam heat from the wheezing radiator meets cool March air. It is Sunday. Quiet enough to hear the tap of an old man’s cane as he walks to church in fedora and overcoat. A boy goes by carrying a bright green balloon. Taxis blaze in sunlight. On a draft comes drifting into my apartment the floral notes of a passing girl’s perfume. A mourning dove casts his lament from the edge of my fire escape.

There are still things worth staying for, I remind myself, even while New York’s glass is half-empty. It’s that emptiness I’m interested in. The absent is easy to forget, and I’m against forgetting. So this book is filled with absence—the shops that have gone missing, the neighborhoods that vanished whole, the exiled poets and painters and dancers, the lost men and women who fixed cars and made sawdust and poured the best cappuccino. This book is for them—and for all of us who came to New York, to the mythical New York, whether from suburban Boston or the deep Bronx, with an ache in our guts, a desperate hunger to become something more, to Be a Part of It, as the song goes, to grab the last gasp of the great city’s big, sprawling, pounding heart.

To you, my fellow desperate and despairing, I say: We was robbed.

PART ONE

Every city changes, and walking through a slowly changing city is like walking through an organic landscape during various seasons; leaves and even trees fall, birds migrate, but the forest stands: familiarity anchors the changes. But if the pace of change accelerates, a disjuncture between memory and actuality arises and one moves through a city of phantoms, of the disappeared, a city that is lonely and disorienting; one becomes . . an exile at home.

—REBECCA SOLNIT, FROM HOLLOW CITY, 2002

1

THE EAST VILLAGE

Mural on the side of Mars Bar. Alex Smith/Flaming Pablum, 2009

I CAME TO NEW YORK TO TRANSITION. TO BECOME A NEW YORKER after a lifetime in one small town. Riding the train into Penn Station upon my arrival, I caught a glimpse of the red neon sign atop the New Yorker hotel and thought, That’s where the great magazine is published—and where my poems will appear. It wasn’t and they didn’t.

But what did I know at twenty-two years old? In my black Doc Martens, black jeans, black turtleneck, black leather biker jacket, I wanted to be taken for a real New Yorker. I wanted to pass—not as something I wasn’t, but as the person I’d always known myself to be. A city person.

The city has the power to rejigger you completely, body and mind, rearranging your neural pathways and setting your heart to a different beat. It speeds up your nervous system, making you sharper and more savvy—if you let it. I welcomed my own urbanization, loving the smells of my neighbors’ cooking and the crush of a subway crowd, savoring insider knowledge about important things, like how to order a bagel, how to hail a cab, and in which booth at Chumley’s did F. Scott Fitzgerald schtup Zelda on their wedding night. (If you take New York into your cells, you pick up Yiddish, too, sparking your sentences with schmuck and kvetch and plotz.)

During my first years in the city, I would learn much more about passing, for I also came to New York to undergo another kind of transition. It was here that I made the passage from female to male, living a queer and transgender life in the days long before Caitlyn Jenner made the cover of Vanity Fair and trans athletes starred in Nike commercials. This book is not that story, but it bears mentioning because it is inevitably intertwined. Every person views the city through a prism of personal experience and, as different as all those prisms may be, for a long time, New York was able to accommodate every type. The city made space for all varieties and combinations. Queer and trans culture is one facet of my prism. So is poetry and literature—another pursuit that brought me to New York—and, later, a career in psychoanalysis. All of it informs my approach to the city. So does the working-class ethnic culture from which I come, mostly Italian, but also Irish dosed with Jewishness by close association (my Irish Catholic father, raised in a Jewish neighborhood, worked the rag trade, a schmatta salesman with a Hebrew Chai dangling from a gold chain around his 1970s neck).

I came to New York because I needed the city, and New York is for people who need cities, for those who cannot function outside of one. Open and permissive, insulating you with the sort of anonymity you can’t find in a small town or suburb, the city allows us to expand, experiment, and become our truest selves. In the New York of the early 1990s, there was no better place to perform that labor than the East Village.

For over a century, the East Village provided an uncommon space. It was, among other things, a long-sought-after refuge for those who never quite felt at home anywhere else. Reclusive misanthropes and creative exhibitionists, builders of junk towers and makers of psychedelic gardens, poets, punks, and queers, activists and anarchists, dominatrices and drug addicts, graffitists, nudists, and underground cartoonists all found a home in the East Village. A barricade of deviance and grit kept much of the straight world out, protecting the neighborhood’s unconventional character. But at the end of the twentieth century, the East Village was invaded, its territory seized, and those of us who’d found our first true home between Astor Place and the East River were displaced. For many, that displacement was physical, one kind of eviction or another. For many more, the displacement has been emotional, a jarring dislocation of the psyche.

The East Village was not always the East Village. The neighborhood east of Bowery and bookended by Houston Street and 14th was simply the northernmost section of the Lower East Side until the early 1960s, when it was carved out and renamed to sound more like its fancier neighbor to the west. The New York Times dates the origin of East Village to 1964. In that year, the guidebook Earl Wilson’s New York reported: artists, poets and promoters of coffeehouses from Greenwich Village are trying to remelt the neighborhood under the high-sounding name of ‘East Village.’ Beatniks, following the likes of Allen Ginsberg, had moved east years earlier, pushed out of Greenwich Village by rising rents after World War II. Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionist painters came in the early 1950s, followed by galleries. The real estate industry, smelling a trail of money flowing eastward from the Village proper, took the name East Village and ran with it in those first days of proto-gentrification.

The headline of a 1964 Times article proclaimed, The Affluent Set Invades the East Village; First Wave Is Lured by ‘Atmosphere.’ It sounds like the beginning of the end. Still, the uptown rich weren’t all that rich. Bohemian bar owner Stanley Tolkin described it at the time: First there were the artists. Then there were the teachers and writers, and little by little, we had everyone—advertising men, doctors who live in walk-up tenements, lawyers just starting out, construction workers. They all seem to work at something during the day. But at night, they change their clothes and become Beatniks. In today’s East Village, it’s hedge fund managers, millionaire celebrities, and marauding dude-bros, but they don’t become beatniks at night. That would be a blessing. Instead, stubbornly, they remain themselves.

The neighborhood’s radicalism, however, was not invented in the 1960s. The streets had long been home to Jewish lefties and Italian agitators, theater people, avant-gardists, anarchists, artists, mobsters, as well as the very poor. In the late 1800s, Tompkins Square Park served as a space for riots and demonstrations against economic inequality. Justus Schwab’s Saloon on East First Street was the most famous radical center in New York, in the words of early feminist anarchist Emma Goldman, who frequented the place. In her memoirs, she called Schwab’s a Mecca for French Communards, Spanish and Italian refugees, Russian politicals, and German socialists and anarchists. In that tradition, a century later, the neighborhood was full of hippies, bohemians, queers, and punks, along with poor and working-class Ukrainians, Poles, and Puerto Ricans, drug dealers, junkies, and murderers. The most dangerous part was Alphabet City, the blocks between Avenues A and D, where landlords left buildings abandoned and set them ablaze for insurance money. With orange flames lighting the night sky, the easternmost section of the East Village became a postapocalyptic landscape of empty lots and forsaken tenements, hollowed husks turned into bordellos, Halleluiah churches, heroin shooting galleries, and squats. Creativity flourished in this war zone of crime and grime. David Byrne credits life on Avenue A with the creation of Talking Heads’ 1979 album, Fear of Music, especially Life During Wartime, a song, he told biographer David Bowman, about living in Alphabet City while thinking of Baader-Meinhof, Patty Hearst, and Tompkins Square. Among locals, Avenues A, B, C, and D stood for Adventurous, Brave, Crazy, and Dead. (In 2016, writer George Pendle told the Times they now stand for Affluent, Bourgeois, Comfortable, Decent.)

In the 1980s, the art establishment moved in, bringing commercial galleries that attracted a new wave of change, a process critiqued by Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan in their 1984 paper, The Fine Art of Gentrification. An Art in America article of the same year described the East Village as a unique blend of poverty, punk rock, drugs, arson, Hell’s Angels, winos, prostitutes and dilapidated housing that adds up to an adventurous avant-garde setting of considerable cachet. That cachet, Deutsche and Ryan wrote, conceals a brutal reality. Namely, the city’s strategy to exploit the art scene for gentrification, for the housing of a professional white middle class groomed to serve the center of America’s ‘postindustrial’ society. Artists and gallerists, the authors argued, were complicit in this process. At the same time, many East Village artists led the fight against gentrification in what became an era of fierce resistance. Today, when people talk about gentrification, they often blame artists, labeling them as frontline gentrifiers. As I’ll explore more in a later chapter, the relationship between art and gentrification is a complicated one, with artists often used as scapegoats to distract from the real culprits.

The Gap moved to St. Mark’s Place in 1988. Taking the former space of the beloved, grungy St. Mark’s Cinema, it was met with there goes the neighborhood outrage. One local painter tossed a cinder block at the Gap’s plate-glass window, but failed to break through. Angry young men urinated on the store and agitators slapped stickers to it that read: Why are you here? and Go away. In an ominous, Orwellian tone, the Gap’s assistant manager told Women’s Wear Daily, "They think we are destroying the East Village image, but like everywhere else, they will accept it (emphasis mine). That same year, just five months after the Gap’s arrival, Tompkins Square Park erupted in riots two blocks east. Protesting a new curfew and the removal of a homeless Hooverville, activists carried bedsheet banners spray-painted with the slogans: Gentrification Is Class War and Gentrification Is Genocide. Police on horseback beat people with nightsticks. Protesters smashed their way into the Christodora, a former settlement house that had just been redeveloped into luxury condos. Occupying the lobby, the protesters chanted a new call to arms: Die Yuppie Scum." The battle for the East Village was on.

In 1994, Mayor Giuliani came into office armed with a paramilitary police force and a zero-tolerance campaign. He waged war on the squats and the communist community gardens. Avant-garde art spaces were destroyed, including the anarchist sculpture garden Gas Station/Space 2B (at Second Street and Avenue B), evicted by a 900 percent rent increase. The Gap on St. Mark’s Place survived (until 2001) and more chains followed. A Barnes & Noble opened at Astor Place in 1994, complete with a Starbucks. Another Starbucks moved in across the street in 1995 (followed soon by yet another), and across from that came Kmart in 1996. Politicians and developers licked their chops while residents blanched. Said one local to the Times, I hate the thought of stepping over Kmart shoppers on my way to buy bagels on Sunday morning.

We saw the warning signs, but had no idea how bad it was going to get. Throughout the mid to late 1990s, the East Village spirit fought back against Giuliani’s bulldozers and the tanks of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), but eventually the spine snapped. By the 2000s, the crime rate had dropped, following a nationwide trend, the charred skeletons of tenements had been retrofitted into new buildings, and too many of the more charismatic residents had died from AIDS. Cleaner and safer, after a century of agitation and creation, the East Village was now prepped for the next phase to begin.

When a notice appeared in the window of the shuttered Second Avenue Deli (forced to close by a rent increase after fifty-two years) announcing that Hooters was Coming soon to your neighborhood, old-school East Villagers flew into collective apoplexy. It was 2006 and we were reeling from the neighborhood’s seismic shift, a change that had come so quick, many of us walked in a daze of disorientation. For a while, I kept stopping, looking around, and asking myself: Where am I? I went to bed one night in a bohemian enclave and woke the next day in a mean-spirited, suburban high school hangout. Now Hooters was moving in? And into the beloved deli opened by Holocaust survivor Abe Lebewohl, of all places. Pastrami and chopped liver would be replaced by Buffalo hot wings and cheese sticks. In the Molly Picon room, dedicated to the star of Yiddish theater and films such as Yidl Mitn Fidl, young women hired for their breast size would soon be serving in short-shorts. A protest blog appeared, titled Hooters Out of Second Avenue Deli. An angry mob began to brew, but then the notice turned out to be a hoax, a kind of protest itself, sending up the ugly new character of the twenty-first-century East Village, with its blocks of chain stores and gangs of frat boys, where the arrival of Hooters felt unbelievably believable.

The Florida-based chain restaurant never came to that spot, but a branch of Chase Bank did, installed just two blocks away from the next-nearest Chase branch and a block or two from several more banks. Today the Second Avenue Deli’s Yiddish Walk of Fame remains, out of context and rapidly fading. Carved in stone on the sidewalk are names from the days when this strip was the Jewish Broadway—Fyvush Finkel, Ida Kaminska, Lillian Lux, Ludwig Satz. The names are worn down, ignored and flattened by the crowds walking past, grabbing cash from the ATM before making a beeline for the next pitcher of beer and bucket of Buffalo hot wings, easily had without Hooters at one of the many laddish sports bars that have sprouted along the avenue.

The East Village has long attracted a youth population from outside the mainstream. They were lefties, Beats, hippies, and punks, queer artists and scruffy castoffs. But in the 2000s, the young people who took over the neighborhood came straight from the mainest part of the Middle American stream. They are basic bros roaring out of sports bars in beery packs, dressed in alpha-male hot pink polo shirts, looking like the preppy villains from a John Hughes movie. In plastic Viking helmets, they howl in the streets. Woooo-hoooo! We, the holdovers, huddle in our apartments as the night reverberates with woo. The girls we call Woo Girls because all they do is woo, stumbling out of hot pink Hummer limousines, waving giant balloon penises overhead while they vomit Jägermeister onto our doorsteps. How could this happen here? I moved to New York hoping to avoid these people for the rest of my life. As legendary downtown performance artist Penny Arcade put it, The ten most popular kids from every high school in the world are now living in New York City. Those are the people who most of us who came to New York came here to get away from.

It used to be the bridge-and-tunnel crowd coming in from Jersey and the outer boroughs to party on the weekends. At least they were part of the orbit around Manhattan, the ethnic and working-class Tony Maneros and Tess McGills of the city’s gravitational field. The new people are much farther flung. And they don’t go home at night. They live among us, in bigger apartments with better appliances. Youth-oriented condos extend the dormitory experience into adulthood, each building outfitted with postcollege amenities. On East 13th Street, the A Building became notorious as frat-house party central for young bankers. The Daily News captured a typical scene: The roof’s perfectly manicured lawn becomes a happy hour ballfield where losing Flip Cup teams have to play Dizzy Bat—they chug beer from a plastic baseball bat and run circles around it while their friends cry, ‘Watch out for the wall!’

While the former East Village had hardly been a tranquil country hamlet, it did have a quietude. The sidewalks weren’t overcrowded. Tourists didn’t dare to visit. There were bars, but it wasn’t Bourbon Street. New York University had dorms, but the student population wasn’t a swarm. As East Village poet Eileen Myles wrote in her essay for the book While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York, there were more of us than them so the problem was fortunately contained. They were actually still part of what there was. NYU’s presence remained in relative balance through the 1990s, until it spread like a virus, its students multiplying by the thousands in new dorms, overflowing into old tenements. Then by the 21st c. they were living in our buildings, writes Myles. They were wandering (or running) through the halls of the building at night with their beers or also in their bathrobes between apartments with their cups of tea. They were incredibly loud. The way they talked. Like no one was living here.

By 2007, the East Village was the second-most complained-about neighborhood in the city, with 4,957 noise complaints called in to Mayor Bloomberg’s 311 phone line. By 2011, the East Village was number one on the Post’s list of neighborhoods with the most bars, topping out with 474 liquor licenses. One resident told the paper, It’s like a red-light district. It’s honking cabs all night. It’s like a bad, disturbing dream. People started to crack up. Frustrated, sleep-deprived residents dumped buckets of water from their apartment windows onto loud bar and restaurant patrons below. They tossed eggs. They unzipped their pants and urinated. Sometimes, driven to murderous rage, they dumped broken glass and scalding-hot oil. But the party never ended.

During one skirmish in the summer of 2015, newcomers besieged Italian restaurant Ballarò. The manager reported on Facebook: I was offended, degraded and treated like shit by a group of 15 drunk people without any valid reason. They were screaming ‘BOO, YOU SUCK!’ at me and my wait staff because Taylor Swift wasn’t playing on our sound system. I then played two Taylor Swift songs for them to placate them. Swift, by the way, had just been named New York’s official Global Welcome Ambassador. The gang started screaming that the songs I played weren’t the right one and I was told that, ‘this place is shit, the music and the people here suck.’ I was then told to, ‘go back to your country with that fucking immigrant face.’ The gang finally left—without paying the five-hundred-dollar check. Ballarò has since shuttered.

A new breed of young people has come to the neighborhood and conquered. As East Village author Sarah Schulman put it, This new crew . . came not to join or to blend in or to learn and evolve, but to homogenize. Even celebrities complained about the homogenization. Chloë Sevigny told The Daily Beast in 2014: walking around the East Village, I just want to cry at the state of it. There are so many fuckin’ jocks everywhere! It’s like a frat house everywhere . . where are the real weirdos? The real outcasts? They’re a vanishing breed here.

When I first moved to the city, making the great financial mistake of a master’s degree in creative writing when the last thing a poet needs is a master’s degree, I was living up on East 26th Street in a miserable NYU graduate housing unit dominated by dental students, in a nondescript part of town called Bellevue South for its proximity to the infamous madhouse. I felt painfully out of place, a young poet among aspiring dentists, all jammed in the elevator clutching their grisly, grinning tooth molds. I got romantically depressed, drinking cheap red wine while listening to John Coltrane and working on my Frank O’Hara knockoff poems when I wasn’t cleaning toilets in uptown apartments for a few dollars an hour. On good days, I’d hike downtown with a notebook in my bag, a knife in one pocket and mugger money in the other, not quite breathing until I got below 14th Street, when I crossed that blessed threshold between Nothing and Everything.

One afternoon, I came upon Astor Place, gateway to the East Village, and felt a sense of wide openness. The thieves’ market bustled around an empty parking lot with junk for sale on dirty blankets. St. Mark’s Place looked like a bazaar in Marrakech, a cluttered and inviting souk spiced with incense. A jazz trio played. Punks went in and out, hair stretched high into impressive, neon-colored Mohawks. Dealers whispered the rhythmic incantation, Smoke, dope, smoke, dope, shroooooms. It was love at first sight. I had found my home, the place I’d been searching for, and moved in soon after. Much more recently, however, Astor Place has become unrecognizable.

Undulating. That was the word that starchitect Charles Gwathmey used for his newest creation, Sculpture for Living. A twenty-one-story glass condo tower with a limited collection of 39 museum-quality loft residences priced from $1,995,000 to over $6,500,000, it began rising on Astor Place at the dawn of the new millennium. The East Village had never seen anything like it. This green monster, as critic Paul Goldberger called it in The New Yorker, looks like a vertical fish tank, humming aquamarine. It doesn’t belong in the neighborhood, Goldberger concluded. By designing a tower with such a self-conscious shimmer, the architect has destroyed the illusion that this neighborhood, which underwent gentrification long ago, is now anything other than a place for the rich.

Gwathmey’s Sculpture for Living not only undulated, it dwarfed everything around it. Astor Place was no longer the open space I had encountered years before. Completely out of scale with the lower-rising nineteenth-century stone and terra-cotta architecture that surrounded it, the tower seemed to have migrated straight out of the dark caverns of Midtown, hailing the horrifying start of Astor Place’s transformation into a corporate office park that realtors would rename Midtown South. The New York Observer marked the moment in 2004 when they wrote that the gateway to the once-bohemian and still hardly wealthy East Village was now poised to become downtown Manhattan’s next important driver of the luxury real-estate market. And it was Cooper Union that put the tower there.

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art had been offering a tuition-free college education since its founding in 1859. To do so, the school relied in large part on their real estate holdings, especially the millions in rent and tax monies from the Chrysler Building, built on land owned by the school. But in 2001, running at a deficit, they launched a plan that would put the Gwathmey tower on their parking lot, and then build two more like it, a wow factor academic building and a corporate office complex. The plan came with boutique zoning changes. The goal of the rezoning, explained the Times, was to maximize the amount of usable office space in the new tower and to allow commercial development on land restricted by law to educational and philanthropic uses. In 2002, Bloomberg’s City Planning Commission approved the scheme and added a plan of their own—to demap Astor Place itself, wiping away the historic street and visually joining the condo tower with the corporate tower to come. To no avail, East Villagers fought the plan, arguing that the large-scale development would turn their eclectic, artistic neighborhood into a sterile business campus. A decade later, the office tower went up. At 400,000 square feet and skinned in black glass, 51 Astor Place became known to locals as The Death Star for its dark and hulking resemblance to Darth Vader’s planet-killing space station. An anonymous satirist started a Twitter feed for the building called @51deathstar, describing itself as Destroyer of neighborhoods. Unloved. Empty inside. Midtown South. The imagined voice of the building tweeted snarky messages like, Hey East Village! Sorry I had to destroy you. My dad made me do it and he’s kind of a dick.

When I moved to the East Village in 1994—though it had already changed, as any old-schooler from the 1970s and ’80s will attest—the place was still full of poets, queers, and crazies. Young people came mostly to live as outsiders, to read their poems at St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the